


Some kind of mistake

by hylander



Category: SKAM (France)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bipolar Disorder, F/M, Light Angst, M/M, Pining, i still don't know how to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-01-31 06:20:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18585538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hylander/pseuds/hylander
Summary: Ever since Eliott first came across the new resident of the apartment 320, he made peace with the fact that Lucas ‘Big Blue Eyes’ Lallemant would, one way or another, turn his life upside down. Thing is, he hadn’t expected that Lucas’ wife and Lucas’ daughter would play a part in it. Because, you know, he didn’t know they existed until it was too late.OR; an Elu Neighbors AU





	1. Chapter 1

****It was a Saturday. For some reason, that particular fact in itself stuck in Eliott’s mind.

What was odd was that it didn’t particularly strike him as any different from the other Saturdays. It started off with Sofiane kicking him awake on his couch with a cup of coffee that wasn’t nearly enough to calm the pounding of a hundred hammers against his skull — courtesy of one (or ten) too many drinks from the night before. While he was twisting around in a sitting position and discarding the blanket usually covering the couch, Sofiane sat on the armrest, looking down at him.

“Eliott, c’mon. You know I like having you here but  _man_ \- you stink.” He pulled a disgusted face as he said so. If Eliott’s eyes weren’t already giving him hell for the sunlight flooding the tiny living-room, he would have rolled them. It couldn’t be that late, considering Sofiane was still here. “Why can’t you just come over when you’re sober for once? That’d make for a nice change.”

A snort escaped past his lips as he was trying to swallow down his first sip of the morning. Sofiane was an actual mother hen, always down to give advises, _especially when_  no one had asked for it — but Eliott wouldn’t have it any other way, and that’s why he always ended up crashing on his couch whenever he was too tired and/or drunk to go home by himself. It was just convenient that Sofiane’s place happened to be located in a particularly lively neighborhood, which meant that more often than not, his place was the closest from where Eliott was finding himself. A waste, considering that Sofiane was rarely (if ever) pulling an all-nighter these days.

“Not my fault you’re always ditching me,” Eliott protested, nose in his coffee. “Idriss too. You guys are the  _worst_  friends.”

What kind of friend let you ring at the intercom and didn’t even open the door? Idriss fucking Bakhellal. He was exactly  _that_  kind of friend. ‘Dude, I can’t keep up with your shit. I gotta wake up in the morning, just go make some other friends to party with,’ he had told him bluntly.

Was it  _his_  fault if all of a sudden his friends had boring jobs and boring lives?

Sofiane gave him a pointed look, before shaking his head as if he had been able to follow his train of thoughts. “I’ve got a job, Eli. Not everyone can afford to get shitfaced every Friday nights and a couple more nights in-between and still keep up with their lives.”

“I’ve got a job too, I’ll let you know,” Eliott retorted, mildly wounded in his pride.

Being overly judgmental was going against everything Sofiane was, although technically Eliott knew there was some truth in it, but after nearly five years of justifying the fact that  _yes_ , staying home on his computer  _was_  part of his job (and a huge part of it at that, not to say  _all_ of it), it was getting a little bit more on his nerves each time someone mentioned it. If anything, he was making more money that Sofiane, and probably more than Idriss as well — EP teacher wasn’t really the starter plan for a millionaire career.

He shifted on the couch, becoming increasingly aware of his wrinkled and slightly damp tee-shirt with every move he made. Maybe Sofiane was right about the smell, after all.

“Yes, but you don’t have work hours like Idriss and I do.”

Eliott shot him an unimpressed look. “You’re a driving instructor, Sof, you don’t treat cancer.” Joke was on him, because after ten years of friendship, he surely knew Sofiane well-enough to be aware that he was as proud to help kids get their driving license as any doctor was to save a life. Twenty years down the road and he’d start lining up on a wall the driving licenses he had contributed to.

Sofiane rolled his eyes. “And you’re still an asshole whenever you’re wasted, nice to see some things never change.” He leaned forward to grab his phone from the coffee table and immediately bolted up. “Shit I’m late. Look, do whatever you want but lock the door behind you and leave the spare key in the mailbox.”

“What’s the point of a spare key if you have both of them in here?” Eliott observed as Sofiane shrugged on a hoodie and fumbled around to grab the things he needed to go — shoes, keys, phone, and wallet— before literally jumping to the front door.

“That’s just a proof you’re spending too much time in here!”, he yelled as he slammed the door behind him, making Eliott wince at the sound.

 *

He stayed put for a couple of minutes, before setting the cup of coffee on the table before him and gathering his things to head out. Usually he didn’t feel so much like things weren’t okay whenever he found himself here, with Sofiane fretting around him — if anything, it made him laugh. But for some reason this morning just wasn’t it.

An awful part of his teenage years had been spent hating himself for not being more like the other kids of his age, with an easy life, healthy hobbies, healthy relationships, healthy self-perception. Yeah, an awful lot of the time, between fifteen and nineteen, he had wished he was more like Sofiane, more like Idriss. More like anybody else. It had started working out for him only after he hit twenty. His meds were on point. He was slowly making peace with the fact that things would never be a 100% easy, and stopped purposefully ignoring the signs when shit was about to hit the fan.

As a free-lance graphic designer, he mostly worked from home, which spared him the prospect of dealing with an asshole boss on a daily basis — and getting fired because of one of his low lows. His sex-life was always a bit of a mess, but not dating anybody was making it a lot easier to juggle between the moment he craved loneliness and those he craved physical contact beyond logic. He was seeing his parents, who lived across town, twice a month, talking with his sister at least once a week, going to his therapist whenever it was needed, and every once in a while, Idriss got invested into a new sport and bugged him enough to join him, or simply to go for a morning run.

It wasn’t a perfect life, but it was healthier than it had been since what felt like forever. For the last five years or so, he had felt reasonably like the rest of his friends and acquaintances. So  _why_ was everyone starting to act like 26 was the age limit for all of this? It was as though they had no idea about all the efforts he had put into this in the first place, and sometimes he just wanted to scream his frustrations out.

The bus-ride back to his place wasn’t long, but it felt a lot like it. His phone had died the night before, so he was only hoping that whatever his drunken self had posted on his stories wasn’t shameful enough to make prospective clients run off to the next graphic designer on their list. He had started making a name for himself when he had scored a campaign promoting a new club in the Marais, two years ago, and although his building couldn’t be considered ‘fancy’ by any means, he was making enough money to afford living on his own in a bigger space than Sofiane’s  _literal_ shoebox.

Talking about boxes, Eliott thought.

A bunch of cardboard boxes were piled up in the entrance of his building. The main door was hanging wide open, a couple of leaves swirling around under the cool breeze and loud voices echoing inside — far too loud for Eliott’s still inebriated, sleep-deprived brain. He had known that the family of four living in the apartment on the fourth floor, the level below his own flat, would lose no time in being replaced — the moment the two parents had stopped fighting for good was when the dad had left and the countdown had started for a single mom in an overpriced city.

As Eliott walked in, careful not to trip, his eyes fell on three guys apparently waiting for the elevator to reach the ground floor, while holding upward the slatted base of a bed. Young, probably in their twenties. And fucking  _loud_.

“I didn’t sign up for this!” one of them was protesting vehemently, his voice bouncing up against every wall and right through Eliott’s brain as he padded further in. When the guy straightened, the two others almost toppled over under the weight of the bed base. “I signed up for a bunch of books and clothes, I’m not a moving company!”

“Bro, can you just  _stop_ whining already?” another one said, adjusting his position with an elbow resting on the wooden frame.

“My point is,  _why_ are we doing all of this, and Lucas gets to just… I don’t know, _slide them_  out of the elevator and inside his flat?” the first one complained.

Eliott almost snorted, and if he had been in the mood for conversation, he would have probably told them that they were fucking spoiled. Back when he moved in, the elevator was out of order, which had been a real pain in the ass to move everything up to the fifth floor — Sofiane and Idriss kept insisting that as long as the number of years he had spent in his flat didn’t equal the number of floors they had to go through, they would never be even.

 _Oh fuck no_ , he thought.

That meant he had five goddamn flights of stairs to go through before crashing onto his bed.

 _Just_  what he needed.

“So following your logic,” the third one, a blond guy with glasses, chimed in, “Lucas should be here, dealing with the heavy shit, while you’re randomly shoving everything in his living-room until we can’t even open the door.”

“Exactly!” the first one exclaimed, then he met the look of his two friends. “Wait no-  _Not_  exactly but-”

“I can’t believe he’s allowed to vote,” the guy with the glasses muttered with a loud sigh, “congrats Baz, you made me lose faith in the democratic system.”

The fact that he threw his hands up in the air as he talked, and that the bed base once again threatened to fall to the ground under his other friend’s protests, offered enough of a distraction for Eliott to reach the stairs without having to go through a conversation he had no emotional interest in.

The pressure of being one among a million other people was nothing compared to the pressure of being known from everyone in a small town. Eliott was fine with being lost in the crowd, especially in a town where people considered it a flaw to be over-sympathetic; that was definitely something he could get behind. It was easy to just coexist with other people without seeking any further contact with them than a polite nod whenever they let you use the elevator with them, or when they held you the door out of habit rather than politeness — that made for fewer people asking annoying stuff from you when you couldn’t deal with it. He scrambled his way up through the floors, occasionally reminding himself that he  _could_ go through the last two flights of stairs without puking. It wasn’t exactly easy, considering that going through the mess that was the fourth floor gave him the impression of being the character of an online platform game. When he made it there, the technological wonder that was an elevator had managed to get the bed base up to the fourth floor before him.

Eliott heard a grunt before he actually saw anything, then he saw the bed base move before he saw the person behind it. A boy was pestering to himself, sliding between the bed base and the wall of the elevator to try pulling it out from the outside, rather than pushing it out from the inside. The frame made an agonizing screeching sound that reverberated through the whole building and had Eliott wincing, but the guy had apparently made peace with every single living soul hating him because he didn’t stop — only slowing down as the meters added to the actual weight of the object. Eliott liked to think of himself as someone at least more observant than most, but it didn’t take a genius to know that the number of smaller boxes waiting by the front door was multiplying the number of chances for something bad to happen.

And as Murphy’s law stated so well, everything that could go wrong,  _did_ go wrong.

The guy walking backward didn’t get to see the box near his foot until he tripped over it, letting out a ‘ _fuck_ ’ as he lost his balance and the bed base toppled over him with a loud, metallic sound. It took Eliott an extra-second to get in motion — really, it wasn’t like shit like this happened every day. The guy was struggling to get out of what looked ridiculously like a wooden cage all of a sudden.

“You okay?”, Eliott enquired, startling him.

“Never been better,” he gritted out.

Eliott smirked to himself and leaned forward to grab the slats and lift the bed base off, before sliding it up against the wall while the guy was laboriously rising up on his feet.

“Thanks,” he mumbled, rubbing his forearm. “I guess some people don’t get the point of teaming up to get shit done faster.”

Eliott cocked an eyebrow. “Let me guess, the other three downstairs are yours?”

“There might be no more than me at the end of the day if they keep up like that.”

 _Sassy_ , Eliott noted. He liked it. For the first time he was actually indulging in a little bit of staring. Not much. The barest minimum, really. First of all, despite having been told him countless times that he looked younger than his 26 years old, he had troubles believing that this guy was an actual grown-up, but maybe it had to do with the fact that he was rather short, or the way his hair seemed disheveled beyond repair — and,  _again_ , Eliott knew a stuff or two about messy hair. What caught his attention was the two, big blue eyes suddenly staring back at him.

Wide.

And blue.

Very,  _very_  blue.

A very dark shade, one of those that even Photoshop had no trouble making pop — which didn’t happen often. Call it a professional quirk, but it was a nice thing to see. There was a bit of an awkward silence, only broken when the elevator dinged behind them, offering Eliott enough of a distraction for his brain to fall back into place, and preferably out of the gutter before he started overanalyzing the wonders that his skinny jeans made to his lower body.

“See? I told you he would be just fine,” the voice of one of the three guys from the hall echoed behind them. “Our Lulu is the best.”

Suddenly the big blue eyes were not focused on him anymore, and Eliott didn’t know how to feel about it. He was just awkwardly standing now, caught between people he didn’t even know fifteen minutes before. That wasn’t the definition of how he wanted to spend his Saturday morning riding out his hangover.

“Are you fucking kidding me? I almost died!”, Blue Eyes protested.

“I told you this would happen,” another one muttered.

Eliott shook his head to himself, and started to retreat towards the staircase while they were busy throwing insults at each other.

Maybe Sofiane was right.

Maybe he was too old for this shit — whatever that was.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for your awesome feedbacks, you guys are the best ✨💓

Eliott wasn’t a morning person generally speaking, mostly because his daily schedule included more often than not coming back home past two in the morning and sleeping off until noon, but he had at least assumed that all the noises he had been hearing since Saturday would stop on Monday morning. Because, you know, as Sofiane said, not everyone had a job like his.

Well, he was wrong. On Monday morning, it was yet another string of loud noises that woke him up, growing louder and louder as they pulled Eliott out of his heavy slumber a little bit more each time, until a final metallic thud resonated like a shotgun through the overall quiet building. He bolted out of sleep, head spinning a little as he tried for a few seconds to gather what the hell was happening, where he was, what day they were and if, somehow, he could get his heart to start beating again without having to call an ambulance. His eyes kept fluttering from one corner of his room to the other as the thoughts streamed in.

The good news was that he was in his bedroom — alone, which was always a plus.

The bad news was that the clock on his nightstand read half past ten in the morning, and that _technically_ , he was the one in the wrong, because _technically_ , people were allowed to make noise at this hour.

He _hated_ that.

Eliott dropped himself back onto his mattress with a sigh, rubbing his face with his hands, occasionally staring and blinking at the ceiling. Moving in wasn’t easy but apparently, Blue Eyes wasn’t the quiet type either — he knew he should have picked up on the name used on Saturday, but he just couldn’t remember, so Blue Eyes it was. So far, all he had heard from his new neighbor were yelled-out conversations during the entire duration of the weekend, in large part coming from his too loud friends, and the incessant come-and-go and rattling noises of someone settling in. Not much to make an opinion, one would say, but the other people living in their apartment complex were discreet, for the most part. In the nearly five years he had lived here, Eliott still had no clue what was his next-door neighbor's name. All he knew was that the man was probably in his forties, single and likely an accountant, or something equally unattractive and equally boring. They had passed each other by a handful of times, and he always looked like he was exhausted and drowning in his ill-fitting suits.

He was still staring blankly at nothing when his alarm went off, and Eliott grabbed it from the nightstand to shut it down as the first couple of notes from Boy Epic’s cover of City of Angels hummed quietly in the silent room. He had exactly thirty minutes to get up, get dressed, and get ready to go before the meeting one of his clients had scheduled with him (read: _for_ him). He took a rapid shower and was heading for the front door when someone knocked. Once. Twice. Eliott frowned and unlocked the door, chucking it open when he found Blue Eyes standing in the doorway.

His hair was even more of a mess than it was already Saturday morning, and a few light bruises marbled his arms pocking out of his one-size too big tee-shirt. Eliott didn’t know why he found the whole thing alluring, but he did anyway.

“I was starting to think you had well and truly died this time,” he remarked with a cocked eyebrow.

Blue Eyes gave him a look and mechanically rubbed the bruised spot on his forearm. It was the exact gesture he had made on Saturday morning, after the bed base disaster, and Eliott could only guess that those were the casualties born from Murphy’s Law. “Nice to know you got worried, I appreciate.”

Eliott found himself grinning, and _maybe_ he tried to contain it. It was only the second time they were talking but for some reason, it didn’t seem nearly as emotionally draining as it could have been. It felt easy. _Almost_ Natural. Comfortable, somehow.

Blue Eyes cleared his throat a little, starting to fidget with his hands. “I- uh. I wanted to apologize for the mess I’m doing these days in the building. I’ve been told by someone from the first floor that it was starting to get on people’s nerves. And, like, my friends- they can be loud. Like, _really_ loud. And messy. Back where we lived everyone was kinda used to it, but-”

His voice trailed off and Eliott tilted his head to the side, slightly intrigued by the sudden change in his demeanor. He hadn’t picked him as the rambly, dorky type — it left Eliott to wonder how those different personality traits didn’t just end up short-circuiting each other in such a small body.

“It’s fine,” he said with a casual shrug. “I got loud friends too.” After an awkward second of silence, he held out his hand, Blue Eyes glancing back and forth between his face and his hand before shaking it. “I’m Eliott, by the way. In case you need an alibi, you know where to find me.”

Blue Eyes frowned, looking rather confused. “An alibi?”

Eliott smirked. “Well, you stated that you were on the verge of murder, if I remember correctly.”

A smile broke onto Blue Eyes’ face, illuminating his features as realization hit him. “ _Oh_. Yeah. Thanks for the offer, I might take you up on that someday,” he said, then he seemed to remember he was still holding Eliott’s hand and nearly dropped it right away. This time, Eliott well and truly bit back a chuckle. “I’m Lucas. Lallemant. Nice to meet you.”

_Lucas_. Right. It was a cute name. A cute name for a cute face. _Back off, Demaury, you’re staring_ , a voice chided in his brain, and strangely enough it sounded an awful lot like Idriss’.

“Nice to meet you too.” He shoved his hand into his jeans’ pocket, cocking an eyebrow. “Was that all?”

“Yeah,” Lucas said, then he tore his eyes away to what Eliott just _knew_ was an invisible spot above his shoulder before adding quickly: “I mean, _no_. I also wanted to thank you for helping me last weekend. It’s really not the best way to make an impression but you didn’t laugh at me and let me die a slow and painful death, so I figured maybe I could offer you a coffee at the very least. Well, only if you’re free, I mean.”

There he was, rambling again, and every single word made it harder for Eliott to restrain a large grin from splitting his face in two. His phone pinging made it a hundred times easier, though, as Eliott was suddenly brought back to reality. “I can’t right now, I was just about to go,” he admitted, and Lucas’ smile fell a little bit.

So that wasn’t _just_ his brain messing with him. This guy really was an open book.

Lucas took a step back from the doorway. “Oh, right. Sorry for the bother,” he winced.

Eliott grabbed his leather jacket and from behind the front door and closed it behind him. For some reason he didn’t want Lucas to think it was just a made-up excuse, so he fished for his keys in his jacket’s pocket and started locking the door behind him. “Another time?” he offered, looking behind his shoulder, where Lucas was already retreating towards the stairs.

Lucas turned around. “Sure,” he nodded with a grin. “Anytime.”

*

“It _needs_ to be perfect. The opening is all that matters, you get that, Eliott, right?”

“I already knew that a week ago,” he remarked as he glanced sideways at the blonde girl next to him.

Scheduling meeting with clients wasn’t something he was doing all that often. Not to be overly introvert, but he had found out early in his career that it was easier to review what the clients wanted once it was laid out on an email rather than simply spoken out in the open. But, _eh_. Daphné Lecomte was another level of enthusiastic. And nervous. Sometimes he wondered what she was on, because it sure as hell looked like it wasn’t legal.

They had met back when he was working on the opening of a club, the year before; at the time, Daphné was the new recruit of an event planning agency, and she had taken the habit of slipping his name to her boss every once in a while, when they needed to promote new places and book new events. Now she was a few months away from launching her own business, the project of a travel agency she claimed she had been nursing since high school, and it was entirely because she had asked him with her huge, puppy eyes (and, granted, because she had helped him out in the past) that he had agreed on helping her to design the perfect logo.

God knew he had come to regret his decision. It was the second meeting and she had yet to decide on a color palette. “You can do that without me,” Eliott had observed on their first meeting.

“No! I need you. I need to know things work fine,” Daphné had protested.

And so he had stayed. Far too long, if you asked him.

“Coffee, I need coffee,” she mumbled, running to the tiny kitchen adjoined to her office, where they had been locked up for two hours already.

Eliott rolled his eyes to himself and slumped back against his chair. Her habit of pacing back and forth while he was sketching things away was always making him dizzy after some time, and he was trying really hard not to tell her to sit _the fuck_ down and shut _the fuck_ up. It took another two hours after lunch for her to _finally_ decide on a color palette, and by then Eliott had already made peace with the fact that they would need to schedule another meeting, if not two, to sort out the rest. He was already dreading the moment she’d have to pick a font.

It was four in the afternoon when he made it out, half-past five when he dragged himself to the bar next to Sofiane’s place, and almost eight when he came back home after both Sofiane and Idriss suddenly called it a night after Eliott suggested they go out.

“Are you kidding me?”, he protested, annoyed.

“Nothing against you, Demaury,” Idriss snorted, stretching out his long limbs high above his head. “Siham will just skin me alive if I get home late. Last time she got mad at me for a fucking week.”

“And she banished me from the flat,” Sofiane reminded, looking all gloomy in his drink.

Eliott shrugged. “She’s never mad at me.”

“No one’s ever mad at you, you fucker,” Idriss grumbled. “Not even your exes.”

“Joris did threaten to burn his apartment to the ground, though,” Sofiane observed carefully.

Idriss barked a laugh that made two girls behind them scoot around on their chair. “But he didn’t.”

“I wouldn’t call that a victory,” Eliott cringed, the story still leaving a bad taste on his tongue.

He and that Joris guy had been dating for about a month a few years ago, and half of their relationship was a blur leading to a manic episode he had very scarce memories of. He didn’t recall very well what happened after that, only that Idriss and his girlfriend Siham had taken him in for a few days while he was coming down from his high and going through the depressive episode that always followed. As it had turned out, Joris had never been heard of ever again and after some time Eliott finally obtained that Idriss and Sofiane kindly backed off and stopped acting like they were his bodyguards. Only Siham continued to treat him like he was her baby, but it wasn’t strictly babying per se — it was just keeping the door wide open whenever he needed anything and never getting mad at him for literally anything.

After separating with his friends, Eliott had taken advantage of the time spent in the subway, on his way home, to rapidly review his most urgent emails and to track his parcel through the Chronopost app — only to find that his precious, 300€ Wacom Tablet had been delayed. That was his luck, really, and that’s why he found himself knocking at the apartment 320 instead of going straight back home.

It didn’t take _three seconds_ before the door swung open, taking him a little aback when a grinning Lucas exclaimed: “Not only on time but-” before his voice trailed off and his eyes widened a little bit when he realized Eliott wasn’t whoever he was waiting.

Technically, he would have found it funny. And probably made a remark. But right now he was too busy trying not to stare at the large patches of skin he could see thanks to Lucas’ denim button down hanging wide open.

Fuck he was fit. Who would have thought?

“Oh, shit, sorry. Hey,” Lucas said, clearing his throat a little bit, and it was thankfully enough for Eliott’s brain to snap back into place. It wasn’t the first six-pack he saw in his life, after all.

“It’s fine, no harm done. I need a small favor though,” he admitted, wincing a little.

Two days had passed since Lucas had popped up to his flat but Eliott hadn’t had much time left to make due on his rain check. The most they had taken together was the elevator so far, and some part of Eliott regretted not having told Daphné to fuck off on Monday, if only for a couple of hours.

Lucas tilted his head to the side. “Sure. What’s up?”

“Will you be home on Friday?”

Lucas’ eyebrows shot up and he blinked a little. “I, uh. I’m not sure,” he said carefully. “I mean, I guess it’s going to depend on the time.” 

Eliott gave a small nod. “Yeah, right. More like, in the morning? I’m waiting for a really important parcel and I had cleared my schedule tomorrow to be able to be there when it’s delivered, but it got delayed. Not to be mean but I’d rather have it in your hands rather than literally anywhere else.”

“No problem, I’ll be there,” Lucas nodded, and he ran a hand through his messy hair. “I’ve got the rest of the week off anyway.”

“Awesome,” Eliott said, leaning back from the doorframe. “Thanks a bunch.”

_Thanks a bunch_. That was an Idriss thing to say, not an _Eliott_ thing to say, and the worst part was that he was practically sure that the way Lucas’ brows furrowed a little bit meant that he was very much aware of that. He was going to strangle Idriss. That was all his fault anyway.

“It’s fine, let’s see if I manage to get it and then you’ll thank me,” his neighbor snorted.

Eliott huffed a laugh and started walking away when Lucas called him. For some reason, he liked the way he said his name, and he internally rolled his eyes at the cheesiness. He scooted around nonetheless.

“There’s still some coffee left,” Lucas said, and this time he was looking at him straight in the eye.

“Make it beers, make it my place, and make it Friday and I’m all in,” Eliott replied nonchalantly, his lips curving into a smirk just as the elevator dinged.

Lucas’ eyes traveled to his right, and Eliott couldn’t refrain himself from following where they had landed. One of the three guys he had seen in the hall the day Lucas had moved in was walking out of the elevator — the person he had been waiting before Eliott turned up, surely. He took it as his cue to leave, and before he could even think it through, he found himself giving Lucas a wink, before jumping up the stairs to his own flat.


	3. Chapter 3

When Friday rolled around, Eliott was still unable to make a choice on whether or not he should be freaking out about having Lucas over. It was one thing to wait for someone to give you the answer you wanted, but it was entirely something else to figure shit out about what you were expecting in the first place. They had met a handful of times, talked about as many, and it wasn’t because he had blue eyes and nice comebacks that he would suddenly decide they were meant to be. The best thing was to keep everything casual. Casual  _and_  under control. That was the plan, and he might add, a nice plan.

Which, naturally, flew out the window as soon as Lucas stepped in, Eliott’s parcel tucked under his arm, his baby-blue sweatshirt making his eyes pop and his dark skinny jeans fitting him in all the right places.

“Hey. Look what I got,” Lucas said, grinning, and it made Eliott’s insides twist in a way they weren’t supposed to. So much for keeping it casual.

The last hour had already been lost trying to deflect Idriss’ attempts to get him to come to Sofiane’s later in the evening, all the while hiding the fact that  _no_ , he didn’t want to come,  _yes_ , he had other plans,  _indeed_  it involved someone cute, and actually  _yes_ , he was usually mad at them for constantly ditching him.

At least his most recent purchase made for a good distraction. Eliott smiled back as Lucas handed him the parcel, with all the solemnity of a Holy Relic. “You mind if I open it now? I just want to check if there’s nothing wrong,” he asked as he made way for Lucas to step in and closed the door behind him.

Lucas nodded. “Sure. No problem.”

They both sat on the couch, and Eliott took the time to crack open two beers before opening the cardboard box — because he was polite, and that’s what polite people did. From time to time, he could see Lucas glancing around from the corner of his eye, when he thought Eliott wasn’t paying attention.

“And there she is,” Eliott drawled, pleased, when he finally got rid of the last protective package a couple of minutes later.

He straightened onto his seat, turning the object for Lucas to see.

“I bet it’s nice, but, like, what is it exactly?” Lucas enquired, frowning a bit.

“That’s a graphic tablet. You know, to sketch things and stuff,” Eliott explained, waving above the tablet as he talked. Lucas’ eyes followed his movements as if it was the most interesting thing in the world and it made him self-conscious all of a sudden. He cleared his throat, and started to put the tablet back into its package. “I’m a graphic designer,” he added, “we don’t really do the whole ‘sketching on paper’ thing anymore so, it’s, like, kind of a big deal.”

Lucas cocked an eyebrow and craned his neck to look behind his shoulder, above the backrest of the couch. “What about these?” he asked, pointing at a bunch of old sketches that were hanging on the wall.

Eliott followed his gesture. Maybe he should have tidy the place a little bit. Thing was, he had been so caught up into  _not_ making a big deal out of this (whatever that thing with Lucas was) that he had forgotten his apartment probably looked like a mess, for someone who had never been there before. Sofiane, Idriss and the others were all, more or less, used to seeing his drawings everywhere, even the old, quirky ones, back when he was drawing people as animals. It was something he had started doing when he was perhaps 13; it was a way of talking about his life, about his feelings, about others, without having anyone meddling in. It was like a coded diary. At worst it just made him weird, and he could live with that. It wasn’t like covering pages and pages of ‘ _I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay’_ , until his pen ran out of ink. It was more subtle, something people didn’t really pick up on like a red flag as soon as they laid their eyes on it.

“Old stuff. Things I used to draw back when I had more time,” Eliott waved.

“And this one? Yours too?” Lucas’ voice sounded intrigued, as he gestured at a framed drawing from the bottom of his beer bottle.

Eliott swallowed the sip he had just taken from his own and snorted. “I wish! C’mon, don’t tell me you don’t recognize him.”

The sketch showed a raccoon, climbing up a weeping willow branch. It seemed to confuse Lucas, who turned to him with a furrowed brow after a good minute of helplessly staring at the drawing. “Should I?”, he asked again, carefully.

“Wow,” Eliott deadpanned. “What happened to your basics? It’s Meeko.” There was a short silence and he cocked an eyebrow pointedly as he elaborated. “Disney.  _Pocahontas_. Rings any bell?”

Lucas huffed a laugh and took another swing from his beer. “I was more of a Pokémon kind of guy, to be honest.” He smirked when Eliott let out a groan of protest. “Aren’t you a bit old for Disney anyway?”

Eliott’s eyes almost bulged and he shifted on the couch, turning his body a little bit more towards him. “First of all, no. Second of all,  _no_. No one’s ever too old for Disney, otherwise humankind would disappear after a generation, because there wouldn’t be anyone to create new Disney content and kids would literally  _die_ from boredom.”

“Wow, okay, touchy subject, I see,” Lucas grinned, his eyes gleaming a little bit. “You seem really passionate about it.”

Eliott shrugged, rubbing the back of his neck. Now that was a little bit embarrassing, because without having too much difficulty talking to new people, it wasn’t exactly his  _style_  to go off on a rant like that. Maybe Idriss and Sofiane were right, maybe he needed to meet new people, just enough to remember how basic interactions worked between civilized people.

“Well, it was kind of my dream, growing up,” he admitted.

“To be a native American princess?”  

Eliott gave him a look and Lucas chuckled. “Given the chance, I’d pick Meeko anytime.”

Lucas hummed in response, and shifted on the couch as well, mirroring Eliott’s position. “I was never really much into the whole fairy tales thing to be honest,” he confessed, tracing the seams of the cushion. “I grew out of it pretty fast.”

“Someday,” Eliott said, somewhat quietly, “you’ll be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” The words had rolled off his tongue so naturally that he hadn’t thought it’d be weird for him to start speaking English in the middle of a conversion. Lucas looked up at him with a curious look, and he felt the need to add: “It’s a quote. From C.S. Lewis.”

“It’s a nice quote,” Lucas said.

Eliott didn’t really know what made his heartbeat rise up.

There was a moment where it was just the two of them looking at each other, and he couldn’t really bring himself to look away. He couldn’t prevent his eyes from tracing the lines of Lucas’ face, falling down to the mole at the corner of his mouth, then going back up to his eyes, looking so bright yet so dark. The flat was silent and the traffic down the street strangely quiet for a Friday night.

Maybe he should make a move.

_Maybe_.

The question answered itself when Lucas broke eye-contact, leaving Eliott to feel equally relieved and disappointed. He stared back at the framed picture of Meeko. “So is it like, an original?” he asked, voice a little rough. Eliott nodded. “How much did that cost you though?”

The atmosphere shifted to something lighter, and it was as though a weight was lifted off Eliott’s chest. He shook his head a little, laughing quietly. “A lot more than I could afford at the time. Trust me, you don’t want to know.” He leaned forward to set his empty beer bottle onto the coffee table. “If you consider that a grown man getting passionate about Disney is weird-”

Lucas gave him a small kick in the calf from his foot. “I never said that!”

“Alright,  _lame_  then.”

“That’s not true. It’s just- I don’t know,” he shook his head, huffing a little. “It’s kinda surprising.”

_Surprising_. It could be all good or all bad. There was no middle ground. But somehow, it didn’t sound like he was being judgmental, and Eliott didn’t feel like keeping up with that topic. A part of him didn’t want to find out whether or not Lucas had meant it the way he inexplicably wanted him to.

“What about you then?”, Eliott asked, cocking his head a little.

_What kind of surprising things are you capable of_ , he almost added, but he restrained himself. It sounded weird. Embarrassingly obvious. As a grown-ass man he didn’t know why he still felt the way he used to feel when he was trying to tell his first girlfriend he liked her, back in middle school. Grown-ups should be capable of talking about their feelings, period.

On the other side of the couch, Lucas shrugged, shaking his head. “Oh, clearly, I don’t have the same level of passion,” he said, teasing, and Elliot tolled his eyes. “I’ve never really known what I wanted to do, and- well, things became a bit complicated in high school, so I started working right after graduating, you know, just to make ends meet.” He looked back up. “I used to work as a delivery man. Crazy job, if you ask me,” he commented before taking the last swing of his drink.

Eliott offered a small nod. “And what are you doing now?”

Lucas pulled a face. “I’m an accountant. Well, technically, I’m just an assistant. It’s boring but it pays rather well considering that the most I do is filling paperwork and sitting behind a screen.”

Eliott smiled. “I never pictured you as… Well, to be fair, I never pictured you as anything,” he confessed, and Lucas quirked a brow, looking mildly offended.

“And how do you think I’m surviving then?” he scoffed.

“Frankly? I thought you were a student on some Campus living off mommy and daddy’s money.”

There was a short pause and Lucas’ smile seemed to tighten a bit, but it lasted only a second — so quick that Eliott barely had time to process. He eventually let out a snort. “Well, you thought wrong.”

Eliott chuckled, then gestured at the beers from his chin. “Want another one?”

“Sure. Maybe you could show me a bit of what you do,” Lucas added as Eliott stood up and collected the empty bottles.

He glanced behind his shoulder with a cocked eyebrow. Okay, no. There was no way he was going to Sofiane’s tonight. There was also no way they both made it out through the evening with their clothes on.

The creature sitting on his couch had been specifically designed for him.

“Alright, let’s see about that then,” he said on his way to the kitchen.

Years of practice were paying off, at least he was nailing the casual tone.  _Literally_  the last thread his dignity was hanging off of. He grabbed two more beers in the fridge and walked back to the living room, only to find Lucas staring at his phone, typing away at light speed with his brows furrowed in concentration.

“Everything alright?”, he enquired after Lucas had hit the send button.

Lucas glanced up, eyes a bit wide. “I think I’ll have to go,” he winced, rubbing the back of his neck and Eliott’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “I’m so sorry, it’s super rude.”

Eliott was still standing in the middle of the living room, the cold drinks in his hand. “Oh,” he said, taken aback. “No, it’s, uh- it’s fine. I just hope it’s nothing serious?”

Whoever had crashed this better have a good excuse for doing so, he almost added, but he bit it back, because he didn’t want Lucas to feel bad — or worse, embarrassed because it wasn’t technically a date. Lucas was already standing up from the couch, each step he took making it clearer and clearer that things were stopping there and then, no matter if Eliott foolishly,  _selfishly_ wanted him to stay.

“No one’s dying, at least I don’t think so,” he mumbled, making sure he wasn’t forgetting anything, and Eliott remembered that his hand was starting to freeze, so he put the beers down on the coffee table.

“I’m so sorry, really,” Lucas said again as he retreated towards the entrance.

“It’s fine. We can still meet another time,” Eliott said, trying so hard to erase the interrogative note in his voice. They  _would_ meet another time. That wasn’t a question.

Lucas nodded, twisting his mouth a little as he opened the front door. “Definitely.”

And with that he was gone.

*

“ _Eliott_.”

Idriss’ voice startled him, making his face snap to the right. He was met with his friend’s quizzical stare. “Sorry, zoned out,” he mumbled, rubbing his eye.

He had ended up going to Sofiane’s, against all odds, and now that he was replaying his time spent with Lucas over and over again in his head, he was seriously starting to doubt the validity of his decision. He had yet to decide what felt more alien in his situation: the fact that he was now finding himself here, or the fact that Lucas coming over to his place had happened at all in the first place.

“I saw that,” Idriss rolled his eyes, nudging him in the shin. “What’s up with you? You’re always there, making us feel bad because we don’t hang out enough and when we’re together you zone out on us.”

Eliott shrugged, dismissive. “I just had a rough week, is all.” He stretched out his arms to make his point crossed, but all he got from it was a less-than-impressed look from Idriss.

“How many nights did you spend out this week though?” Before he could even answer, his friend twisted his upper body on his chair to glance at Sofiane, who was rummaging through the cupboards in the kitchen to bring out more snacks. “Sof, let’s start a bet.”

Eliott offered him his best glare in return. “ _None_ ,” he bit back, “I had lots of work to do. You guys don’t have the monopoly of being overworked.”

“Yeah, right,” he snorted inelegantly, shrugging as he reached for his phone and scrolled through it.

Sofiane brought back a bunch of colorful packages and dropped them onto the coffee table. Because he hadn’t been raised by the wolves, Eliott instinctively reached for several of them and started emptying them in various bowls Sofiane had grabbed in the kitchen.

Eliott took his eyes away from his potato chips package and glanced up when Sofiane said, conversationally: “Are you seeing someone?”

He blinked a couple of times, stopping his task before spilling everything onto the carpet. “What?”, he blurted out, and all of a sudden, Idriss seemed  _way_  more interested by the conversation than his phone. “Where is this coming from exactly?”

Sofiane shrugged nonchalantly as he kept emptying whatever type of nuts was in the green package between his hands. “Well, it’s been a while since you dated anyone.”

“Dating someone and seeing someone are two different things,” Eliott objected.

“So you’re seeing someone,” Idriss chimed in, grabbing a handful of chips from the bowl Eliott was filling.

It earned him a slap on the hand and Eliott glared back when Idriss shot him a dark look of protest. “I never said that.”

“No but you’re drawing a line between the two,” Sofiane remarked, sitting next to him.

“Because there  _is_ a line.”

Idriss shook his head, stuffing his mouth with more chips as he spoke. “Sof, you agree with me, he’s seeing someone.”

“He’s seeing someone.”

“Oh fuck  _off_ ,” Eliott protested rolling his eyes and slouching back against the backrest.

“C’mon,” Idriss said again, resting his elbows onto his knees. “Tell us who they are at least.”

Whoever said that you had achieved true friendship when you wanted to strangle your friend at least once a day had never found themselves in this kind of situation. He was usually pretty chill about most aspects of his life, particularly because dating wasn’t his priority and hadn’t been for a while, but whenever Idriss started to go on a rant about it like a man on a mission, Eliott wanted to strangle him at the very least  _once a minute_. Sofiane looked a little more reserved, but he was staring with just the same intent as Idriss, and so Eliott ended up sighing heavily.

“My new neighbor,” he gritted. “We’re hanging out, there’s nothing more to say. We aren’t seeing each other, we aren’t  _dating_ each other. We’re just hanging out. That’s  _all_.”

There was a terrifying minute where Sofiane and Idriss exchanged a look without saying anything — Eliott wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but damn he  _hated_  that —, then Idriss grabbed his phone again and after unlocking it with a swift movement of his thumb, asked without even looking up: “So, what’s Lucky Boy’s name?”

Eliott gave him a suspicious look. “Why do you care?”

“Instagram, duh.”

He huffed. “I’m not doing that! It’s cheating.”

“I thought everything was low-key,” Sofiane piped up nonchalantly, and Eliott glared at him.

“It  _is_ low-key,” he snapped. “I just don’t want to end up comparing myself to whoever he’s been dating in the past five years. You know it doesn’t sit well with me, and as my two best friends, I thought you had at least more delicacy than that.”

Idriss pursed his lips but set his phone down nonetheless. “Alright, if you think it’s best, then we will roll with that.”

“Thank you,” Eliott responded haughtily.

The worst part was that he had meant it. Instagram was cheating. Instagram was finding out about his center of interests all at once. Instagram was finding out about his favorite song in his most recent story. Instagram  _was_  about finding out about all the people he had dated in recent years. That kind of thing put too much pressure on him, and now that he knew his limits, it was easier to handle, or so he thought.

He was wrong.

Because the following morning, as he was coming back to his apartment complex after dragging himself out painfully early to buy some rolling tobacco, he found himself glancing absent-mindedly at the short brunette standing by the main entrance of their building, her hand nonchalantly resting on the handbrake of a stroller. The door swung open, and next thing Eliott knew, Lucas was there as well, chatting with the brunette.

It wasn’t strictly the fact they talked that made his pace falter and his stomach churn painfully.

The baby Lucas was carrying on his hip and smiling at, however, definitely was.


	4. Chapter 4

 

 

Eliott stared at the screen of his phone, like he had been doing far too many times ever since he fell into that damn rabbit hole that was Instagram.

_Love of my life_.

It was written, in all caps, and it made Eliott hate himself a little bit more each time. The picture in itself? He could live with it, even knowing she was the girl he had spotted with Lucas last Saturday. The caption? That could mean anything and everything all at once. But there were dozens of them. Videos of Lucas being a dork with her. Close-ups of their hands tangled — or their legs. Birthday declarations. Anniversary posts. And then-

Then came the little one. Eliott had no idea what her name was. Lucas didn’t have much about her on his Instagram, but her mom’s account had a whole bunch of pics of him feeding her and holding her. For some reason, though, he kept coming back to this post in particular. The most recent one Lucas had posted, the day before the evening he had come to his place. It was the one that made Eliott resent this situation the most — all the while knowing he had no right whatsoever to be upset. If he had been building castles in the sky, it was _his_ problem, not Lucas’. Not his girlfriend’, or wife’, or whatever. And certainly not his kid’s.

_Still_.

He should have listened to Idriss. He should have been sneaky and found that fucking Instagram account earlier. Everything would have been much simpler and he wouldn’t have been left feeling like shit for something that wasn’t his to feel.

He hadn’t seen Lucas, not even caught a glimpse of him ever since the moment he spotted the three outside the building, and frankly, it was best. There was nothing better than _not_ stumbling every five minutes on your cute but very much taken new neighbor when you were trying to get over your stupid crush on him. Because, yeah, that was a stupid crush right there, no matter if he had started acknowledging it only when it had turned out to be impossible.

Maybe a part of him was relieved. Tiny. Secluded in a corner of his brain.

A huge part wanted the ground to swallow him every time he came across Manon though — because, eh, he knew her name now, not like he could still pretend he didn’t —, which happened on a daily basis.

He had just lit up a cigarette one morning, at the foot of the building, and was waiting for a client to pick up the phone when she had greeted him with a polite nod. He had replied with the same gesture, and just like that they had started existing in the same world. Once his reflex pushed him to hold her the door as she kept struggling with the stroller. Another time he had just hopped in the elevator, only to find an abandoned pacifier, attached to a string of wooden beads, lying on the floor. For some reason he crouched down and picked it up, but just before the doors closed themselves, Manon appeared outside and once again his reflex pushed him to block them.

“Oh, you found it, thank you so much,” she sighed, relieved. “I thought she had thrown it in the street.”

Eliott’s eyes traveled from the pacifier to her blue eyes, once, twice, then he nodded and handed it back to her. “You’re welcome.”

She smiled and waved him goodbye, before retreating towards her flat.

_Ava Rose_ , he thought as he unlocked his front door, once he’d reached his floor. That was the name spelled on the wooden beads. Lucas. Manon. _Ava_.

He shook his head to himself while stepping into the quiet apartment. He had never minded living alone because he had literally fought for it — against his parents, against his friends, against himself. But right now he didn’t remember the appeal. He sighed, then stepped back, closed the door and locked it before shoving his keys into his pocket.

He needed to get laid.

*

The blinds of his bedroom suddenly snapped open with a hissing sound, and Eliott groaned, face burying into his pillow as the morning light flooded in. He didn’t know which day it was, but he wasn’t particularly keen on finding out. Neither about that, nor about the person who just decided that it was a good idea to make his eyeballs melt with his skull.

“Well, it’s been a while since I last saw you do that,” a voice muttered somewhere around the bed.

It took Eliott an extra-second to realize it was Sofiane, and that if Sofiane was here, it meant he had used the spare key. It pissed him off. They had a deal. Sofiane had the spare, but he had no right to make use of it. If anything it was just for one of the many occasions Eliott lost his own.

“Do _what_?”, Eliott gritted into his pillow, not caring if it was rude or if the words didn’t come out just right.

There was a sigh. “Sleeping around,” Sofiane answered bluntly. “Distancing yourself. Not answering my texts.” He paused, and Eliott could make up the crease of concern between his brows without having to look, then his friend added: “Eli, are you okay?”

Eliott huffed into his pillow, then rolled onto his back, squeezing his eyes shut. “I am,” he said, perhaps a bit more harshly. He opened his eyes carefully, then sat up, holding the sheets reasonably high on his waist. Sofiane was patiently waiting at the foot of the bed, arms crossed, like the good dad trying not to throw a tantrum. It made Eliott sigh, and he ran a hand through his wild hair. “Look, I know what you think, and you’re wrong, okay? I’m not- I’m not _manic_. It’s got nothing to do with me being bipolar. I’m just having a shitty time, and I’d rather spend it alone.”

Sofiane cocked an eyebrow. “Sorry for not having thought about that when I stumbled on the girl you just slept with crawling out of your apartment,” he deadpanned.

Eliott wanted to glare, but all he managed to do was to stare blankly at his friend. He didn’t have enough energy to be angry. Everything had been burned out this past week, when he had finally decided to make use of all the entries he had in a bunch of clubs around Paris, but never used because Sofiane and Idriss were a thousand times too boring to tag along nowadays. Of course, Daphné hadn’t been pleased when he had to call in sick, but he guessed it was mostly because the girl he was with had been cackling loudly at whatever she was looking on her Instagram feed.

“Just go away,” he mumbled, flopping back down onto the mattress.

“Eliott, I’m serious. What happened? Last week you were telling us about your new crush and now you’re burying yourself under the covers.” To be fair, Eliott _did_ answer the question. Just with his mouth pressed onto his pillow, which, technically, may not have been the best idea to be understood. “I didn’t quite catch that,” Sofiane pointed out.

“He’s got a girlfriend,” Eliott snapped. “Or a wife even, for all I know. And a fucking kid.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. _Ah_ ,” he repeated sarcastically, then he shrugged to himself. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m fine alone.”

_I’m used to crushing on straight guys_ , he added inwardly. At least, his last functioning brain-cell was working in his favor to keep the filter up between his brain and his mouth. He didn’t want to have to explain Sofiane that he used to have a crush on him, back in high school — back when he was so desperate to find some balance, some control over his life, that even the tiniest, simplest gesture was enough for him to fall in love and mistake his gratefulness with stronger feelings. It went back to ten years and now Sofiane was just his close friend and nothing more. There was literally no point in bringing it up now, except if he really wanted to make a mess.

“Are you sure it’s true, though?” Eliott peeked out from his pillow, looking at Sofiane with a quizzical expression. “Are you sure it’s even his kid? I mean, plenty of people have roommates nowadays. You did live with Idriss at some point and you two were never a couple.”

“Look, Sof,” Eliott retorted, trying really hard not to hurt his friend’s feelings, “I’m not stupid enough to make assumptions based on nothing. His girlfriend’s all over his Instagram account with fucking love declarations. I hear the baby cry, I see her walking around with her stroller. I don’t know what kind of messed up world you live in but in mine these are proofs enough that I need to fucking back off and stop having shitty ideas.”

Sofiane heaved a sigh. “Alright. Alright, yeah, maybe. But just, don’t ignore me. Okay? I don’t mean to intrude or to upset you, I’d be just as worried if it were Idriss,” he concluded before leaving the room.

*

Eliott’s digital pen slipped onto the graphic tablet like any other goddamn pencil in the world onto a paper sheet when the wailings picked up again. He slapped his hands onto his temples with a furious hiss, squeezing his eyes shut in frustration as if he was six all over again and trying not to hear his parents fighting.

He was going to murder someone.

Or worse, he was going to lose his sanity.

The baby had been crying for three hours straight, then had relapsed for fifteen minutes, just enough for Eliott to think it was finally all good — and then had started all over again. He just couldn’t take it anymore. He’d have already gone out, if it wasn’t _one in the fucking morning_ and if he had a few hours to lose in a club, where he’d hopefully get to _enjoy_ the background noise. But since he had done practically nothing for the last few days, taking entirely too much time off to go out and about and party more nights than his body could possibly handle, what was bound to happen was finally just about to happen: he was in the deepest shit, with a shit-ton of shitty deadlines coming his way, and not enough hours to possibly get through all of it.

Below his flat, the baby was still crying; sometimes her wailings seemed to fade out, but he just assumed that her mom (or her dad) was simply walking around the apartment trying to ease her. Well, it didn’t _work_. It took ten more minutes for Eliott to snap, scrap his chair on the floor as he stood up from behind his desk, and strode out of his flat without even caring about walking in socks or locking the door behind him. He knew what he was about to do was petty, and mean, but he didn’t care. He simply needed to let out some of the pettiness he had bottled up since his last encounter with Lucas, two days ago.

Eliott was walking out the building, when he had stumbled on him, baby in one arm as he was fighting to fold up the stroller with his free hand. As soon as Lucas had caught sight of him, after simply uttering a ‘hi’ in response to Eliott’s polite greeting, he had immediately said, blue eyes sharp and tongue even sharper: “Now that I finally get to see you, could you, _please_ tell your girl to stop screaming so loud? The building’s old and we got a baby, you know.”

And truth be told, Eliott had been so stunned, and so _vexed_ , that all he had found to answer was “I will tell them.”

That was a far cry from all the sweet banter from last Friday.

If Lucas had been literally any other guy, _any_ other guy with whom he had shared no more than a single evening, and no physical contact whatsoever, and that the guy had treated him the way he was doing right now, Eliott would have never even so much as thought about him ever again — except perhaps during one of those evenings where people casually recounted their worst moments in life around a glass of wine.

But unfortunately for him, Lucas was not any other guy, he was the guy who lived on the floor below. He _had_ to hear about him, and so it was only fair that Lucas did too, Eliott thought bitterly as he knocked onto the front door of the apartment number 320. It didn’t take long for it to open, but still long enough for him to work himself up some more.

“Hey,” Lucas mumbled as he stood in the doorway, the baby’s wailings echoing louder from inside the flat. He was wearing pajama pants and a wrinkled, plain white tee-shirt, his hair sticking in literally every possible direction.

It didn’t go unnoticed that Lucas’ blue eyes were bloodshot and painfully red, but Eliott was too petty to let himself distracted by something like that. “Can you do something about it or I can definitely make peace with not getting one minute to work?” he snapped.

Lucas opened his mouth to answer but the baby’s cries suddenly intensified, making his shoulders slump a little more. “I’m sorry- I’m really sorry, she’s teething and Manon’s out of town and-”

He trailed off and Eliott found himself standing there like an asshole. Of fucking course. It was his luck, to decide to be petty just when no one could do a single fucking thing about the situation that bugged him. He should have thought about the teething thing, but it wasn’t like he was used to having babies around. Lucas watched behind his shoulder, looking more than a little defeated, and Eliott would have found it funny if he didn’t actually think Lucas was on the verge of crying too.

“I, uh, yeah. I-, you know what, nevermind,” he muttered, taking a step back from the threshold.

Lucas spun around when a particularly loud and slightly worrying screech echoed from wherever the baby was inside, and Eliott didn’t know why, _he didn’t_ , because he wasn’t compulsively _polite_ , but he followed Lucas regardless.

It was the stupidest thing he had ever done, but he was doing it anyway. It was like seeing a car-crash on slow-motion, he just couldn’t stop his feet from padding inside, and his hand from closing the front door. He was on auto-pilot, and he was already regretting it as he followed Lucas inside the living-room, where the baby was fussing in her baby-seat. Her face was red and crumpled from crying, and he could make up the streak of long-dried tears down her cheeks.

“C’mon Ava, please,” Lucas insisted quietly, rubbing her tummy as she kept kicking up in the air with her feet. His voice wavered and Eliott felt truly sorry for him, to the point of momentarily forgetting about being pissed.

Not just momentarily, in fact, he realized as a good minute stretched out with him standing there and Lucas looking completely helpless next to Ava. He reached out to touch her forehead, letting his fingers caress her red, chubby cheeks.

“They don’t give stuff to make it easier for them while they’re teething?” Eliott enquired, shoving his hands into the pockets of his sweats, and it seemed to startle Lucas.

He stared at him blankly, as if he had forgotten he was even there. “Yeah,” he said after a moment, “but it’s like, effective to a certain degree. She’s got tons of teething rings but they always stop helping after fifteen minutes. I don’t know why, they aren’t even warm when it just stops working!” Lucas’ frustration was so painfully apparent that Eliott winced to himself.

“Hey, calm down, it’s gonna be fine. She’ll just tire eventually,” he offered.

“I thought so too,” Lucas sighed, turning back to Ava after a moment, “ _six hours ago_. She’s already had Ibuprofen, she doesn’t do well with those stupid chamomile drinks and she refuses to eat anything. She’s gonna be dehydrated before she even stops crying.” He sighed some more, and shook his head to himself as he leaned forward to pick Ava up from her baby-seat. “Guess we will just have to take another ring. _Again_.”

If Eliott saw that Lucas was shaking a little bit when he stood up he didn’t say a word. He caught the purple teething ring that Ava was waving angrily in the air before it fell to the ground, and made a point of not making a stupid face as saliva suddenly coated his fingers. Instead, he behaved like a grown man and followed Lucas in the kitchen to rinse his hands and the ring. In the meantime, Lucas had opened the freezer and was struggling to pull out another plastic toy without making the whole content of the freezer fall down on the ground or bump Ava’s head into anything in the process. Eliott took the freezing toy from Lucas’ hand and put the warm one for him to stock in the freezer, before the door closed and he handed the fake set of keys to Ava. The object seemed to stir some interest after a few moments of waving, and she eventually grabbed it and brought it to her mouth (not before she hit Lucas’ chest with it a handful of times though).

Lucas turned bleary eyes to Eliott, handing his hand out. “Can you give me-”

For some reason, Eliott immediately grabbed the kitchen towel left onto the kitchen elements, probably after recent use. Lucas mumbled a small ‘thanks’ and wiped Ava’s chin clean. “Let’s hope this one will last longer than fifteen minutes,” he whispered tiredly as he retreated towards the living-room, rocking her a little, Eliott following close behind.

Ava was gurgling pensively, the plastic keys faintly echoing as Lucas sat down with her. He glanced up with drawn-out eyes. “I’m so sorry, really,” he winced, “you should go back upstairs and enjoy some quietness as long as it lasts.”

Eliott waved, huffing a little. “It’s fine, it’s fine.” He fidgeted a little then perched himself onto the armrest of the couch. “I mean, it’s true I work better at night but, like-”

“Yeah. You had your hands full. I know.”

Something in Lucas’ tone made him glance down at him, a little surprised, but then Lucas was already busying himself, trying to find a comfortable position on the couch without leading Ava to start fussing again. The baby was growing quieter, too busy she was munching on the keys, and Eliott hadn’t realized yet how much his head was starting to hurt. He couldn’t even imagine what Lucas was going through. Maybe that’s why he had snapped at him the other day — it would definitely explain the change of mood between them.

Yeah.

That was probably that.

Eliott shrugged. “It’s not like I’ll be able to do much if in fifteen minutes she starts crying again.”

Lucas looked down, embarrassed, his eyes looking hazy enough to make it believable if he started to cry right there and then. “I’m so sorry.”

“Hey, it’s fine. I was just joking, Lucas,” Eliott quickly said, and he nudged him slightly in the shoulder, pulling a face. “Timing might be a bit lame though, sorry.”

_Why are you doing this_? _Why?_

It was stupid. But it felt natural. How could you just fight comfort?

Lucas groaned, sighing a little as he rested his head on the edge of the couch. “I’m too tired to smile, you’ll have to wait for another day.”

Eliott snorted quietly, then shifted to sit down onto the couch. “I’ll just wait to see if we get past fifteen minutes,” he explained as Lucas drew his eyes on him with a quizzical expression.

“Twelve,” he replied, somber. “Last time it was twelve.”

Ava paused, her mouth wide open as she stopped chewing on the keys, and she seemed to take a particular interest into Eliott, her blue eyes staring at him as if she was wondering all of a sudden what he was doing here. _Yeah, I’m wondering too_ , he said to himself.

“Well, we will wait and see,” he said out loud. “You know, one minute after the other.” He glanced at Ava, who had started busying herself with the plastic toys. “It seems to work, though.”

“Don’t get too cocky just yet,” Lucas huffed, adjusting his position on the couch with a ‘humph’. “I love Manon and I love Ava, but if I get the chance of escaping this hell for a week I’d happily take it, just saying. I just need some silence.”

At this point, the words sank in without particularly cause Eliott to suffer. It wasn’t that deep. It was easier than this time in high school Sofiane had started dating a girl and was talking about her all the time. It stung a little bit, but it was how it was. Nothing more to say.

_Really_.

“Talk to me, I can’t fall asleep with her,” Lucas mumbled, reclining Ava into his arms.

Eliott quirked a brow. “Why don’t you put her back to sleep?”

Lucas took a deep breath. “I’m afraid that if I stand up she’ll start stressing out or something. And right now my head hurts so much I can’t take that risk. I need my twelve minutes of calm and silence.”

“We’re already two minutes in, sorry.” Eliott laughed quietly when Lucas turned desperate eyes on him. “Okay. So. Hum. What do you want to talk about then?”

“I don’t know. Literally anything. What are you working on?” he asked without tearing his eyes away from Ava.

Eliott didn’t know much about babies (nothing, really), but it almost looked like Ava’s eyelids were going heavy. “Designing flyers and promos cards for a club. It’s kind of what I do most. Marketing and stuff. And I get free drinks and free tickets sometimes.”

“Sounds cool. Cooler than my job.”

“What kind of accountant are you?” Eliott asked, cocking his head a little.

“I, uh, I work for an agency that sets up seminars for companies and stuff. Kind of an event planning thing, but the opposite of the party type,” Lucas explained, lowering his voice. “Manon works there as well.”

“Oh,” Eliott replied, then he adjusted his voice to match the level of Lucas’. “Did you, uh, did you guys meet there or something?”

“Nah, we met in high school. We weren’t talking much back then, we kind of were onto different sides of a large circle of friends, and then we lost track of each other.” Lucas looked briefly at him then sank a little further into the couch. “We only reconnected, or rather, well, you know, _connected_ , because I was delivering lots of stuff to the agency when she was an intern. It kinda fell into place like that. We practically met on a daily basis because of that and then we hung out together outside of work and stuff. After a while- well, after a while she started suggesting I should pick up my studies, just to get a better job. So I did eventually, I went for a quick training course and she got me a job in the same agency.” He smiled, then added: “She’s the best.”

Eliott tried to swallow down the lump forming in his throat.

_You don’t get to be upset._

_You do not_.

“I dropped out of art design school,” he said, almost whispering. It was the first thing that came to his mind as he was desperately trying to find another (safer) topic. Lucas glanced at him, looking interested, and Eliott rubbed the back of his neck, propping his right leg to rest his ankle on his left knee. “I didn’t want to waste so much of my time learning things I didn’t care about or that I knew already. I was bored so I took a few commissions outside from school. It was easy and fun and I got paid for this so after a while I just figured I could do well enough without a degree. Kind of useless when you’re doing in the self-employment department.”

Lucas had a ‘makes sense’ raise of eyebrows. In his arms, Ava was still clutching at the set of plastic keys but her eyes were getting heavier, drool dribbling down her chin. Eliott leaned forward and grabbed an abandoned towel on the coffee table, then handed it to Lucas who gave him a tired smile in return.

“Have you been living here for long?”, he asked, wiping her face clean.

“Almost five years. At first it was a bit expansive, but I didn’t want to back down and go back to living with my friend Idriss. It was fun and all but once you’ve tasted being on your own…”

“I’ve never lived alone. Funny right?” Lucas twisted his mouth in a crooked smile. “Before, I was living with my three friends, those you met the day I moved in. It was fine and cheap, but after some time the flat got crowded. Basile and Yann were dating and their girlfriends were constantly home and it got a bit too much for me at times. So I moved in with Manon for a while and now we’ve moved here because the other place was _way_ too expansive.” He remained silent for a moment, then shook his head a little. “I’ll end up in my forties, letting everything and everyone down and just go live in Bali, I’m telling ya. Running on some beach every morning and stuff.”

“Sounds nice,” Eliott chuckled. “I’m more of a snow person though.”

Lucas cocked an eyebrow. “I never said you’d be there,” he deadpanned.

“Ow, that _hurts_.”

They shared one more glance and laughed quietly.

“I suppose I could make an effort and make a trip or two in Alaska every once in a while,” Lucas whispered casually after a minute or two. “You know, just to get away from all that vitamin D.”

Eliott smirked. “Yeah. Sure. The vitamin D.”

There was a silence as they stared at each other. It was a shame to see such beautiful eyes ruined by sleepless nights, Eliott couldn’t prevent himself from thinking. Now he was starting to understand what his mom meant when he wasn’t sleeping enough during his teenage years, and she always ended up complaining that it transformed his whole face. He had always brushed it away because that came from his mom, but maybe he was starting to get the point.

“Has it been twelve minutes already?”, Lucas asked.

“Nope. Why, I thought you needed your twelve minutes of silence?” Eliott teased softly, shifting a little on the couch to rest his elbow onto the backrest. “Don’t tell me you want them over already.”

“No, I just want to get a sign that she finally got tired enough to sleep for good.”

“What if she wakes up after thirteen minutes?”, Eliott didn’t resist to ask.

Lucas glared at him, but it was more endearing than strictly menacing, with the bags under his eyes and his messy hair. “I’ll hit you thirteen times if what you brought up brings bad luck.”

Eliott snorted, resting his head on his folded arm. “Alright then. Let’s wait and see.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> let's agree on one thing: they are dramatic in every universe.  
> (also, i was tired of trying to make this chapter better so i'm posting it bc i'm about to lose my mind)

As it turned out, it took two more rounds of teething rings, after the set of keys they took out of the freezer, before Ava started to calm down for good. They talked a bit more, whispering lower and lower as the baby was drifting to sleep.

When Lucas left to change her, Eliott tiredly glanced around the living room, for what felt like the first time since he had gotten here. There were pictures, framed here and there, hanging on the walls, sitting on the mantle of the out-of-order fireplace. Manon and a couple of girls grinning broadly on the beach, during summer. Lucas and his friends. Ava the day she was born. Manon and Lucas. Manon, Lucas, and two more people. There was one of Manon’s sweatshirts abandoned on the armchair next to Eliott, some pregnancy books on a shelf and others covering a century of Feminism or fashion.  _What am I even doing here_ , Eliott thought. 

His life was upstairs. His vinyls, his computer, his graphic tablet. He was just an intruder here, and knowing that Manon wasn’t even in town made it all the more difficult not to feel guilty about it.

Yet, when Lucas returned with Ava, he didn’t move, and they picked up the conversation where they had left it — something about sixteen-year-old Eliott sneaking in the school at night to repaint an entire wall. They talked some more, about their music tastes this time, and when the clock hit four, Lucas finally went to put the baby to sleep and Eliott found no more pretext to stay.

“I should get back upstairs,” he said, stretching his limbs as he talked.

He was practically sure that the bags under Lucas’ eyes had gone two shades darker since he had arrived. It made him want to hug him. Wrap his arms around him and draw him close until he could rest his chin on top of his head. He was the perfect size to be hugged — that was one of the things Eliott had noticed.

Lucas didn’t say anything, but when Eliott moved to the front door, he followed him. 

“Have a safe trip home,” he said, grinning despite his tired features, as he leaned in the doorframe.

Eliott’s lips curled into a smile. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“And here I am, trying to be caring,” Lucas retorted, rolling his eyes.

Eliott chuckled quietly, biting down onto his lip. His heartbeat raced faster when Lucas’ eyes followed the gestured.  _Go home_.  _Go home already_. He couldn’t do anything. No matter how much he wanted to — to reach out, to touch him, to kiss him. Despite his best efforts, his arm moved on its own accord, and before he even realized it, his fingers brushed a strand of Lucas floppy hair. Stupefaction passed through Lucas’ eyes, and his eyebrows twitched ever so slightly, as if he was trying to keep a straight face.

If he had been free to kiss him, that was how he would have wanted to do it.

Right here, right now. But he wasn’t.

With a lingering look behind his shoulder, he left.

*

It was around 9 when Eliott woke up, with heavy eyes and a stiffy neck, and entirely too much work to deal with. Dragging himself from one room to the next was motivated in large part by this simple fact, and also the irrepressible need to get coffee into his system — not sure he would have made it out of bed otherwise.

After lunch, he allowed himself a break to go buy some emergency supplies (a new lighter, to begin with, because he was really no good with matches).

A note was slipped under his door.

_Thank you for last night, you saved me._

_Text me if you want to hang out. It’s nice having you around._

A number was scribbled underneath.

Eliott stared at the few words, heart beating faster than he was willing to admit. He folded the paper and put it in his back pocket, before grabbing his jacket and heading out.

 

He didn’t text.

*

Trying to avoid your own neighbor(s) turned out to be a lot easier than Eliott had thought, when you don’t have the same schedule in the first place. Lucas and Manon left together before 8 in the mornings, and came back at around half past six at night; Eliott’s schedule, for his part, was basically anytime in-between.

He was still thinking about Lucas.

A lot more than he was supposed to, actually.

 _Especially_ when he had decided on not taking things with Lucas any further (whatever that was that Lucas wanted from him).

It worked well, really.

Until someday it didn’t.

It was roughly a week and a half after that night they had spent watching Ava together with Lucas; Eliott had just checked on his mail when he came face-to-face with Manon. She was wearing one of those oversized sweatshirts tucked into a pair of mom jeans, a denim jacket folded under her arm. A casual look if there was any, and there wasn’t any trace of makeup on her face — yet, she was beautiful. She smiled when she saw him.

“Hi,” she said, sounding genuinely happy to meet him, when he politely nodded at her.

He hated the fact that she was nice.

He hated the fact that he  _found her_ nice.

“You’re Eliott, right?”, she said again. “Lucas talks a lot about you. I’m Manon.”

She offered her hand and Eliott considered his options quickly, before shaking it. “He talks a lot about you too.”

Apparently it was funny, because she chuckled lightly. “Thank you so much for being so patient with us. He told me you even helped with Ava while I was away. I bet he was totally freaking out and I’m glad you were there.”

How did he keep finding himself in situations like this? That was a mystery.

He fidgeted a bit with the belthoops of his jeans, shrugging a little. “I didn’t do anything, really.” Understatement of the year. Drooling after the dad’s baby while they were in the same room didn’t really qualify him as a good babysitter, which couldn’t bug Manon because he highly doubted she knew about that part.

“Lucas is still very insecure about being alone with her, no matter if I keep telling him that babies don’t break.” She had that love-sick expression on her face that made Eliott equally soft and want to punch a wall. “Don’t tell him I said that, he hates whenever I bring it up.”

 _Why don’t you just stab me with your keys?,_ he wanted to yell.

“Alright,” he mumbled, coughing a little. “I’m pretty busy these days, so I’m not going to be able to, uh, hang out with him though.”

“Oh, yeah, he told me that too. I think he misses you. I don’t know what you guys have been up to but you made an impression on him,” she said, laughing, then she unfolded her jacket and put it on. “Anyway, I gotta go. It was nice chatting with you. If you ever feel like dropping by, you’re welcome.”

And with that she left, leaving some flowery perfume in her wake.

*

“Eliott, I love you but there’s a limited amount of time you can spend staring at a bra before my manager starts finding it fishy,” Siham observed, as she swiftly slid next to him into an alley of the store. “We got a lot of high-schoolers these days trying to steal stuff.”

He turned around to find a woman with a pair of red-rimmed glasses staring at them from behind the counter, next to the entrance. Siham exchanged a small ‘told you’ look with him when he turned back. She was wearing one of those unsold products she, alongside the other girls working at Undiz, was supposed to wear as her work uniform. Her black tee proclaimed in pink letters that she shouldn’t be bothered on Sundays, which wasn’t all that funny but completely true — Idriss had learned about it at his expenses when they had started dating, a lifetime ago.

Eliott shrugged, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I could be trying to find the perfect gift.”

Siham cocked an eyebrow. “These aren’t the kind of things you wanna buy your sister,” she said, pointing at a row of leopard printed bras.

Eliott frowned, scrunching his nose in disgust. “That’s something I’d rather not think about, thank you.”

She chuckled. “A little bird told me your thing these days would be more Calvin Klein than La Perla anyway.”

Eliott glared at the floor. “Idriss can’t keep a secret for shit.” Not that it was a secret per se, but still. Plus, lots of girls owned Calvin Klein panties, for what he knew, but he didn’t feel like taking the conversation there.

Siham grinned, examining a bra she had picked randomly from the shelf to look like she was actually busy with a customer and not just spending some time with one of her boyfriend’s friends. “I’m counting on that to ease my mind in the coming years. So, what are you doing here? And don’t tell me you just came by to say hello, I don’t have much time for that no matter how much I like having you around.”

Eliott huffed a sigh and stared at his feet. “Your big bird doesn’t know the full story. Calvin Klein is a lot more complicated than I thought he was.”

Siham paused, turning to him with a pair of panties in her hands. She glanced next to Eliott’s shoulder, probably to her boss, then put the panties back on the shelf and dragged him away from the prying eyes, towards the pajama section. “How much complicated are we talking here?”, she asked, careful. “Are we talking about a ‘Joris’ level of ‘complicated’? Do I have to call the cops?”

He snorted and shook his head. “Do you think-,” he paused, then sighed. “Do you think you can love two people at once?”

Siham blinked, then tilted her head, frowning. “Ow. Care to elaborate?”

Eliott’s eyes trailed to the shelf. “He’s with someone,” he mumbled. “And I mean she’s great. She’s nice. She’s even beautiful.”

“Isn’t that the moment where you’re supposed to tell me she’s a bitch who gets in the way of your happiness?”, Siham suggested, leaning on the shelf.

“They have a baby. If anyone’s getting in the way of anyone’s happiness, it’s me,” Eliott groaned, and before Siham gave him the ‘oh no’ speech that went along with the ‘oh no’ expression she already had on her face, he quickly added: “But he’s giving me so many signals, and I just- I mean I  _like_  him. I like him a fucking lot. But it’s obvious he’s got feelings for her too, and that she’s got feelings for him as well. I just- I don’t know.”

“It’s a wonder how you and Sofiane always manage to get yourself in situations like these,” Siham muttered, shaking her head.

“Believe it or not but I’m not seeking them.”

“I know, sweetie, I know. But there are a thousand guys out there and you manage to get hooked by one who is giving you mixed signals and has a baby on top of things.”

“Sofiane has been single for ten years just because Imane is busy with med school,” Eliott deadpanned. “I don’t know how that compares.”

“Yeah, you’re right. At least we know Sofiane would treat her right and the other way around,” Siham said. Eliott looked at her and she sighed, gently squeezing his arm. “Eli, I don’t know what you want me to tell you. Just be careful not to end up hurt if you decide to follow through with it.”

 _Easier said than done_ , he thought begrudgingly as he exited the store a few minutes later, drawing up the hood of his sweaters when he stepped in the street. Siham had to shoo him away before her manager started to pester her, but invited him over for dinner, arguing that they’d have plenty of time to talk before Idriss came back from whatever gym place he went to these days. It hardly cheered him up. If anything, going to her had left him with more questions than answers. No matter, in the end, whether or not he was ready to share Lucas. No matter whether or not he was ready to share him, his affections, his love, his time. He wasn’t sure he  _wanted_ to be involved with someone who was ready to put up with a situation like this — and put his loved ones through it all.

His feet took him to the bus stop nearby, and he pulled out his phone to check on the time. The rain was getting heavier, cars passing by splashing up waves of dirty water onto the sidewalk and practically onto his shoes.

“Hey there,” a familiar voice startled him.

His eyes snapped up from his phone, meeting Lucas’ blue gaze.  _Thinking of the devil_. His hair was all damp from the rain and his face had found back some colors since the last time he had seen him, but he still looked a bit tired. Uncertain, even, as he was fidgeting next to him. 

“Lucas,” Eliott said, a little bit taken aback. “Uh, how are you?”

“I’m fine,” he shrugged. There was a pause before he added: “You didn’t text.”

“No.”

“But you saw the note.”

“I did.” He swallowed, heart thrumming in his chest, and pressed his lips hard together before he shook his head. He wasn't keen on bringing it up in the street, but he didn't feel like making up stories about why he hadn't texted in nearly two weeks. “Lucas… I don’t think it’s going to work the way you want it to work.”

“Why not?” The blatant disappointment and the way Lucas’ face fell made his insides twist painfully. “I thought there was something between us,” he said quietly, eyes trailing to the ground, fixing a puddle. “I thought we had something.”

“I thought so too,” he admitted, slumping back against the metallic frame of the bus stop. “But I don’t want this. Not-  _Not_ like this, at least. How is that even a life? For you, for me?”

Were they supposed to establish a calendar? To decide when he would get to spend some time with him? Would Manon even know about it? How could they manage to hide it from her, if they even decided on giving it a go? Eliott literally lived upstairs, and like Lucas had said, the walls were thin.

Lucas looked up, brows furrowing. “Look, I’ll admit the situation isn’t- well,  _ideal_ , but-”

“Ideal?” Eliott repeated, eyes widening. “ _Ideal_? Lucas, living at your parents’ while being thirty-five isn’t  _ideal_. This-” He shook his head. “This is so much more than  _not_ ideal.”

“So what? What if it isn’t?,” Lucas snapped, and the harshness of his tone matched the thunderstorm in his eyes. “I like it as it is.”

Eliott was taken aback, just like the last time Lucas had snapped at him. He was staring right at him furiously, almost defiantly. It made Eliott lose his confidence and threw his attempts at remaining calm by the window.

“But I don’t!” he exclaimed. “We aren’t anything and it already makes me want to kick something, to simply know you’re with them! How is that supposed to work when I feel like I’m the bad guy of my own story?”

Lucas opened his mouth and closed it. Pain flashed through his eyes, soon replaced by anger and bitterness. “I’m so sorry that you having…  _whatever those feelings are_ for me is what makes you depreciate yourself,” he articulated, voice rough and strained.

He took a step to the side to leave the bus stop and stride under the rain, and Eliott didn’t even fight the urge to follow him because his legs moved before he even gave it a thought.

“For fuck’s sake, liking you isn’t the problem!  _Sharing you_ is!”, he found himself practically yelling, grabbing Lucas by the arm and making him spin around. How had his life gotten so dramatic? When did he suddenly become some mainstream fucker running under the rain to catch their significant other? “I don’t want to have to share you,” he said, earnestly. “I could deal with sharing you with Ava, but with Manon, I just- I can’t. I know she’s Ava’s mom but-”

Lucas stared at him, right in the eye, and said nothing for an agonizing minute; Eliott was left to stare back, unable to do or to say anything else. He couldn’t think properly, he was just feeling like everything was coursing through his brain too fast for him to be able to process it.

“You think she’s mine?” Lucas said eventually. “You think Ava is my daughter?”

That wasn’t what Eliott was expecting to hear. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but certainly  _not_  this. “I don’t- I mean I  _thought_ -,” he stammered, but before he could finish a proper sentence, Lucas furiously hit him square in the chest.

“Well you’re wrong,” he blurted out angrily, “and I honestly can’t believe you thought I was enough of an asshole to hit on you with a girlfriend and a baby!”

Eliott rubbed the spot on his chest. “I never said-”

He was cut off once more, once again by something that seemed to knock the air of his lungs. Lucas grabbed his face and crashed their lips together, in a searing kiss that Eliott had dreamed about more times he would ever admit it. He didn’t care that they were in the middle of the street, and he couldn’t care about the rain drenching them both — once passed the initial shock, he kissed Lucas back, pulling closer by the waist.

They broke apart as suddenly as they had come together in the first place.

“I’m not Ava’s dad,” Lucas said, and the words sank in, making Eliott’s heartbeat yet again faster at how much of a relief it was to finally hear those words. “And I’m not doing whatever you thought I’m doing with Manon. We live together but-”

This time, it was Eliott who cut him off, claiming his mouth just enough to make him shut up as he cupped his jaw. “Details later,” he said, resting their foreheads together, his thumb grazing the skin of his cheek.

Lucas huffed a snort, but it sounded a little shaky.

 _Later_ , Eliott thought, chewing on his lip, somewhat bashful all of a sudden.

With dry clothes.

 

Or maybe without.


	6. Chapter 6

**Siham**

If you wanna drop by to chat, my shift’s over

**Siham**

You’re still coming right?

**Siham**

Eli?

**Siham**

Okay I trust you not to put yourself in danger one way or another

Maybe just text me when you’re free and we’ll plan another night

**You**

I’m so sorry I didn’t see your texts

**You**

I’ve been er kinda busy

Maybe another day? ❤️

 

“So, do you, like, send heart emojis to random people?”

Eliott glanced up from his phone, to where Lucas was sitting next to him on the couch, busy trying to nail the casual pause. He was all clad into the sweatpants he had fetched from his flat and the hoodie Eliott had lent him, once they got to his place and that Lucas decreed he was cold in his tee-shirt. They hadn’t talked much since they had left the bus stop together; the most they had done was walking close enough from each other so that their arms brushed every now and then.

“Seriously, you’re jealous?” he deadpanned.

Lucas huffed and brought his legs to his chest. “Coming from you, that’s fairly comical.”

“I swear to God if you start laughing at me for not thinking that a guy living with a girl and taking care of a baby screams ‘not the baby’s dad’, I might actually kill you,” Eliott glared, setting his phone screen down onto the coffee table.

“Seriously, you never registered all those times I was hitting on you?” Lucas cocked an eyebrow as he rested his arm onto the backrest.

Eliott snorted. “I _did_. I just didn’t know what was _your_ deal. It’s not the first time I’d be falling for a straight guy. You learn to deal with it,” he gestured vaguely, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Oh, sure, that worked very well.”

The smirk on Lucas’ face made Eliott want to reach out and kiss it off.

“Not like your technics are on point either.”

“You literally _winked,_ Eliott, then you went on ogling me like a piece of meat for weeks,” Lucas scoffed, shaking his head. “I’m not sure you’ve got any advice to give.”

“Not my fault you look like a snack,” Eliott waggled his eyebrows. He could still remember that evening Lucas had opened the door with his shirt wide-open, and a part of him was wondering how that would feel to touch the skin he had tried to forget.

Lucas rolled his eyes with a huff. “And here I thought you were cool. Next thing I know you’re going to be a dubstep fan.”

Eliott laughed. “You might not want to look at my vinyls right now.”

Lucas gave him a pointed look, and suddenly stood up from the couch. “Sorry to disagree, but I feel like I need to know what-”

Eliott protested, grabbing him by the waist and pulling him back. Lucas was thrown off-balance and crashed on top of him in a fit of giggles that made Eliott feel incredibly warm. Lucas’ back was pressed against his chest, Eliott’s arm loosely wrapped around his midsection, and it took a moment for Lucas to move away from his lap, but only to slide a few centimeters away to the side.

“Feel like calling it ‘later’ already?”, Eliott asked, tilting his head.

Lucas seemed to ponder the question. “I think so, yeah.” He sat cross-legged on the couch. “I told you, I’m not Ava’s dad. I’m her godfather though, and I’m helping Manon out because Ava’s dad’s a bit of an ass if you ask me. She’s been all over the place since they broke up.”

“When was that?”

“A month ago? Maybe a month and half,” Lucas sighed. “She was a mess, and I needed a new place, so we decided to move in together. For me it was a win-win situation but she was a bit- you know, reluctant at first. She was afraid that Ava would become a burden for me.” He snorted. “I told her she was being stupid. I guess she thought of other stuff I hadn’t thought about.” He glanced at him and they both chuckled.

“You really care about them,” Eliott observed, smiling.

“Yeah. I do. Manon and I-… Manon and I, we both have dysfunctional families. We kinda found each other and we built something like that,” Lucas admitted.

There was a small pause as he looked up at him.

His big blue eyes were capable of gleaming with mischief, squinting sarcastically or observing with the utmost softness in a few minute span of time. It made Eliott want to learn about all of his thoughts, all of his expressions and all of his tiny quirks.

Lucas eventually looked away, fiddling with the sleeve of the hoodie. “Look, I was serious when I said I like my living situation as it is,” he said. “I could do with a few more hours of sleep but other than that I love Ava and Manon is a sister to me. So if that’s going to be a problem, then I don’t think-”

Eliott reached out and covered Lucas’ fidgeting hands with his own. “It’s not about me, Lucas,” he said, seeking eye-contact. “If you’re happy like that, it’s fine.”

A smile broke onto Lucas’ face, illuminating his features and lighting up his eyes. “Really? You wouldn’t be- like, I don’t know, mad at me for staying home to babysit for free?”

“Not if I can play dubstep while I’m on my own.”

“So you’re really not going to even try to deny? You really _are_ a dubstep fan?” Lucas groaned.

Eliott grinned, shrugging. “What can I say, I’m only human.”

Lucas shook his head, laughing, as Eliott’s phone started pinging again. Once. Twice. Lucas’ blue eyes traveled a couple of times between Eliott and the coffee-table, before the latter leaned over and reached for his phone. It was another text from Siham, telling him that they could meet sometime later that week.

He caught Lucas’ curious look, a small twitch in his eyelid making him wonder if he was not trying to simply play it cool.

“Siham is my best friend’s girlfriend. I may or may not have gone to her today to complain about you,” Eliott admitted. “It’s only fair I cancel the plans we had made to keep up with that topic after work.”

Strangely enough, Lucas didn’t say anything at first.

“I may or may not have complained about you too,” he groaned, looking at the coffee table. “I think Manon got fed up, that’s why she went to talk to you yesterday.  _Specifically_ when I told her to mind her business, for the record.”

Eliott grinned, leaning a little bit closer, until their faces were only centimeters away. “We could have nothing to complain about, if we set our minds to it.”

“Our minds? Really?” Lucas hummed, leaning a little bit closer as well.

Eliott pretended to give it a thought, then softly brushed his nose against Lucas’. “Well, yeah. Amongst other things perhaps.”

“Scratch the perhaps and I’m all in,” Lucas whispered, before closing the distance between their lips.

Eliott smiled into the kiss, letting the gentleness of it all wash away his doubts and his resentment of the past few weeks. Lucas’ lips parted slightly, enough for him to slide his tongue in his mouth, deepening the kiss like he had been dreaming of since the first time they had talked. He let his hands run along his sides, pulling him closer until Lucas was sliding in his lap. Closer, closer, yet still not enough. Somewhere along the line Eliott had become greedy, unapologetically greedy, but he couldn’t care less; his hands traveled down his spine and settled onto his hips, then his thighs, then his hips again, his body shivering at the mere feeling of Lucas’ fingertips grazing his cheeks and his neck. Lucas broke the kiss, both of them gasping for air and stars in their eyes.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” Lucas breathed, lips only a centimeter away from Eliott’s, his cheeks flushed and his hair tousled. “I had seen you before.” There was a pause then he added: “Before you helped me with the bed.”

Eliott’s brows furrowed. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Lucas said, voice rough, then he averted his eyes and cleared his throat a little. “I saw you the first time I came to visit the flat. You didn’t see me, you had your earbuds on and there was this song blasting in your ears- I don’t even think you realized there were people around you.” He chewed on his bottom lip, plump and red from the kissing. “It might be the reason I convinced Manon to move here.”

“You took the flat just to have a chance to meet me?” Eliott said, eyes widening.

Lucas huffed, cheeks red, and he leaned back until Eliott’s hand traveled up his back to prevent from falling. “The flat was nice, don’t get cocky.”

Eliott grinned, humming playfully as he leaned forward to nuzzle along his jawline. _That’s how it feels_?, he wondered briefly while Lucas was holding back a fit of giggles when he trailed kisses there. _Feeling special?_

*

It was too early.

He didn’t know exactly what time it was, but he just felt like it was too early, particularly for someone to be stupidly knocking at the front door. One could argue that he had been losing track, with every passing year, of what most people assumed was “early”, but it was a privilege he was fine having.

“There’s someone at the door,” Lucas mumbled, without even moving an eyelid.

“Hmm.” Eliott pulled him even closer with the arm he had snaked around his waist when they had started spooning, and buried his face deeper in the crook of his neck. It was the only answer he was willing to give right now. Whoever was on the other side of the door, whatever they wanted – it could wait.

“Eli,” Lucas said again, this time wriggling a little in his arms. “There’s someone at the door.”

If he had any intention to get up before (which he thankfully didn’t have), it would have been now dead and buried. The way the nickname had rolled off Lucas’ tongue so easily, added to the general sleepiness, was way too endearing.

“I know, and I don’t care,” Eliott groaned as the knocks persisted.

“Just go and tell them to go screw themselves.”

“I don’t want to get up.”

Lucas huffed. “I’ll make sure you spend the best night of your life if you do.”

“That’s some level of cockiness right here,” Eliott mumbled, eventually pushing himself away from the warmth of Lucas’ body. “You better make due on this.”

He reached for his pair of sweatpants discarded the night before, not bothering with underwear when he was fifteen seconds away from getting back here to cuddle until the world had forgotten about them for good.

In the bed, Lucas waved from his hand, unfazed. “I’ll think of something.”

Eliott snorted and shook his head, running his hand through his untamed hair as he walked through the flat, chucking the door open with a less than welcoming expression on his face. For some reason, as soon as his eyes landed on the three guys standing by the door, he instantly knew that he could stop dreaming about going back to bed — even before the first one of them opened his mouth.

“Holy shit it’s true he’s a snack,” he blurted out.

“ _Dude._ ”

“What? I can’t say that either?”

“We’re here for Lucas,” the blond guy with the glasses interrupted, with a heavy sigh. “Manon said we were gonna find him here.”

Eliott blinked. Oh. Right. That’s where he knew them from. Well, _knew_ was a big word, considering he had never talked to them, and that the most he had seen of them ever since he had come across them for the first time in the lounge was through Lucas’ Instagram.

“Yeah, he’s, uh,” he cleared his throat, gesturing vaguely. “He’s still slee-”

“What the _fuck_ are you doing here?” Lucas’ voice intervened in his back, making his head snap to the side. His boyfriend was standing just behind him, hair tousled, scowl on his face, his black boxers and the tee-shirt Eliott was wearing the night before on.

_Don’t get a boner now_ , he thought half-heartedly. Still, Lucas wearing his clothes made him feel all sorts of things that he was inconveniently not supposed to think about.

“You weren’t answering, so we got worried and came to check on you,” the third guy said.

“Funny, because the last time I called every single one of you to help me with Ava, you all made up bullshit excuses,” Lucas deadpanned.

“That’s different.”

“How is that different?” Lucas huffed, and the guys’ eyes immediately traveled up to Eliott. Something seemed to go unsaid, and one of his boyfriend’s friends eventually sighed.

“Look, Lucas, we were supposed to meet Friday night. I didn’t give you hell for it because I assumed something was… well, going _on_ ,” he muttered, clearing his throat as Eliott laughed a little, “but we got worried. It’s been two days.”

Lucas glared, before turning to Eliott. “Eli, meet my _dearest friends_. Yann, Arthur and Basile. And this is Eliott. Now fuck off,” he said, slamming the door shut.

*

“That wasn’t very nice of you,” Yann said, sounding mildly offended as he slouched back against the backrest of the booth they had all crowded in, at the coffee shop down the street. “We care about you, Lulu, and that’s the reward we get for it?”

“Nice people don’t walk around trapping their friend into meeting their boyfriend,” Lucas groaned into his drink.

“We didn’t _trap_ you,” Basile protested, sputtering crumbs of croissant everywhere as he spoke.

Arthur scrunched his nose in disgust and rolled his eyes to himself. “We’re nice, deal with it.”

Eliott smirked in his own drink, thoroughly enjoying the spectacle. Not that he wouldn’t have given at least a kidney to crawl back under the blankets with Lucas, but right now he was having fun watching him being roasted. The conversation went pretty smoothly once Lucas stopped pouting, and Eliott grabbed every piece of information he could draw from the conversation. Yann was a journalist, Basile seemed to be an educator of sorts, Arthur was halfway done with a PhD involving petrochemicals and environment, and they had all met in high school, except for Lucas and Yann who had been friends since middle school.

“So, Eliott, are you planning on doing Lulu dirty?”, Basile asked all of a sudden, taking another bite of his third croissant.

“ _Baz_.”

“What?” he protested, and the worst part was that he seemed genuinely lost. “What did I do now? I thought we were here to give the shovel talk.”

“Basile, I swear to God,” Arthur growled, pinching the bridge of his nose, “I’m not gonna stick around my whole life to prevent you from getting your ass beaten up. You should be starting to think before you talk.”

Eliott let out a small chuckle. “It’s fine, it’s fine. I don’t plan on doing anyone dirty for that matter.”

“Really?” Basile squinted. “Because you’re like, so _hot_ , so objectively I’m trying to know how Lulu managed to score-”

“Well, I don’t know either,” Lucas interrupted, eyes throwing daggers, “but at least it didn’t take me nearly _a year_ to get one date.”

Eliott nearly let out that considering the beginning of their relationship, they could well and truly have kept it up for a year before anything serious happened, but he kept it to himself.

“It didn’t take me a year,” Basile countered. “She was busy.”

There was a collective snort between Arthur, Yann and Lucas.

“Sure, Daphné was ‘busy’,” Arthur snickered, mimicking the quotation marks obnoxiously.

“Busy for a year,” Yann commented, nose in his coffee.

That was when it clicked in Eliott’s mind, as Lucas and Arthur started laughing. “Hold on, Daphné, you said? Daphné Lecomte?”

Lucas turned a quizzical look on him. “Yeah. You know her?”

“Of course, I work for her, I’m in charge of developing her new brand,” Eliott said, shrugging a little.

Basile chocked himself on the sip he was having, and he ended up spitting it out, splashing his button down and Arthur’s shirt in the process.

“Did I say something wrong?” Eliott enquired, furrowing his brows as Yann and Arthur were patting Basile in the back while he kept coughing a lung out. Lucas leaned forward to hand him a napkin, but his friend pushed his hand away.

“ _You_ ’re the hot designer guy?!” Basile croaked out between two coughing fits.

Eliott sent a confused and slightly panicked look to Lucas. He was the _what now_?

“Daphy’s been talking non-stop about the hot guy she’s working with and Mr. One-Braincell over here was convinced she was cheating on him,” Arthur filled in, rolling his eyes. “Bro, we fucking told you a thousand times she wasn’t cheating.”

“I never said she was cheating,” Basile retorted.

“Sure, that’s why you’ve been scanning all fucking Instagram to try to find him,” Arthur groaned.

“I can assure you, it’s always been professional between us,” Eliott added, taking a sip from his coffee. “She’s, uh. She’s a bit too intense for me.”

“She’s too intense for most people, don’t worry,” Lucas snorted, patting Eliott’s leg under the table.

The conversation kept up for about half an hour, then they all gathered onto the sidewalk outside of the coffee shop. “By the way, are you guys up for an afternoon at the flat?,” Lucas asked. “Like, next weekend probably? Manon and I want to make a little something to celebrate the fact that we moved in, but it’s a bit tricky to play it party hard these days so we’re, like, going to keep it low-key.”

“Low-key,” Arthur repeated. “What kind of low-key are we talking here?”

“Manon’s cakes type of low-key,” Lucas shrugged.

“I’m in,” Basile said immediately. “Her cakes are too die for.”

Yann and Arthur approved in unison.

“What about you? Up for it?” Lucas glanced up at Eliott. 

“Yeah sure,” he smiled. 

There was something equally exciting and equally scary in the prospect of attending an event, even a small get-together, as Lucas’ boyfriend. He hadn’t been a part of a couple since… Way too long, particularly if he was leaving the Joris incident aside. A thought crossed his mind as they walked back to their apartment complex, his arm finding its way around Lucas’ shoulders almost naturally.

“Would you, uh, would it be too much if I get my friends to come too?,” Eliott enquired, cocking his head as they waited at a crosswalk. “Just three, not thirty. They’re already giving me hell because they want to find out everything about you. Might as well kill two birds with one stone?”

“Are you comparing introducing me to your friends to a _chore_?” Lucas scoffed.

“Well, the problem isn’t you,” Eliott said, serious, “rather that I’m hoping you won’t freak out and dump me in front of everybody if _my_ friends give you the shovel talk. I don’t doubt Arthur could get rid of my dead body in an acid bath, but like, my friend Idriss can be a bit much when he wants to be.”

Lucas’ eyes narrowed. “Am I supposed to freak out? You think they won’t like me?”

Eliott laughed, pecking Lucas on the cheek. “ _Of course_ they will like you.”

*

Instead of next weekend, and due to an insane number of scheduling conflicts, get-together at Manon and Lucas’ took place a Saturday afternoon at the end of the following month, making Eliott’s and Lucas’ worlds eventually collide, among enough sweets and cakes baked by Manon to feed their building — probably the adjacent one as well. According to Lucas, she had that habit of stress-baking since high school, which is why he wasn’t all that surprised anymore as she kept bringing more and more things to eat to the already full table, set in the living-room.

“Don’t worry, I’m fine,” Manon had insisted when Lucas and Eliott had enquired. Her ex-boyfriend, Charles, had suddenly decided that he would drop by that very weekend to meet his family in Paris, and spend two days with his daughter. “He’s just getting jealous because he saw Eliott with Ava on a few Insta stories and suddenly he can’t deal with not being the only man in my daughter’s life.”

“When is something _not_ my fault?” Eliott had protested while Lucas was laughing.

The guests had started to arrive early in the afternoon, filling the living room. Eliott, who had gone to his flat to grab something, was surprised to come face-to-face with Imane once he got back to Lucas’. “What are you doing here?”, he asked, disbelieved, although not before greeting her.

“Well, it’s not thanks to you that I got invited, to say the least,” she deadpanned. “I’m a friend of your boyfriend’s. And Manon. We go back to high school.”

_So that’s what people mean, when they say the world is small_ , Eliott figured as he chatted with her for a while. It became slightly awkward when one of Lucas’ friends, Emma, showed up with her boyfriend Alex — who, roughly six months ago, had been claiming he was just in for some fun as he was stripping Eliott naked — but if anything Eliott was accommodating. When Alex persistently looked the other way, he simply focused on his boyfriend, as Lucas kept introducing him to new faces. Yann, Arthur and Basile welcomed him as a long lost friend, shouting and screaming as soon as they caught sight of him.

The first meeting between Idriss, Sofiane, Siham and Lucas had gone well, if only because Eliott had already prepared himself for all the obnoxious comments Idriss and Sofiane would make about him ‘getting soft with the years’ and how they ‘never thought they would see Demaury cuddle’ and a whole bunch of crappy things like these that made Eliott roll his eyes.

“It’s too bad the little one isn’t here, I would have paid to see you interact with her,” Idriss snickered while Lucas was talking with Siham — Sofiane had long sneaked out to talk with Imane.

Eliott glared. “Well, as it turns out I’m not as bad at it as you’d think I am.” It was only half a truth, considering that Ava was the least impressionable six-month-old baby girl in the world, but no one needed to know that he had absolutely no hand in the miracle.

He kept talking a minute or two with his best friend, then he went to check how things were going in the kitchen. “Need anything?” he offered as Manon was spinning around like an octopus. 

Lucas wasn’t lying, everywhere Eliott’s gaze landed he could see cupcakes, colorful macarons, cookies, something that looked like lemon pastries and various chocolate cakes — there were also a few baskets of mini-croissants and mini-pains au chocolat. Imane, who was leaning against the fridge alongside Sofiane, widened her eyes comically and shook her head fondly with a smile.

“It’s fine, actually these are the last ones,” Manon said, smiling proudly, then she frowned: “If I didn’t forget anything. Well, if I did, that’s too bad.”

Imane grabbed a few things to help get the plates in the other room, and Eliott went to imitate her, followed by Sofiane.

“Lucas seems to be a real keeper,” his friend observed.

Eliott snorted. “Why, because he’s got a roommate who can cook for an entire town?”

“Nah. I mean, he looks really nice. That’s a chance the bad blood got cleared between you two, because you’d have really lost a serious opportunity at being happy otherwise,” Sofiane observed.

“You’re growing soft, Sof,” Eliott huffed, but he couldn’t stop himself from grinning. He was about to head towards the other room when Sofiane called him out.

“Eli,” he said, sounding more serious. “Did you-” He paused, then bit at his bottom lip nervously, and Eliott already knew what this would be about, before his friend even got behind the idea of not having a hundred choices of words to speak his mind. “Did you tell him?”

His grip on the plate he was carrying tightened, or maybe it was just something in the pit of his stomach. In any case, it made his skin itch a little and he averted his eyes. “No.” The last month had been so happy that Eliott couldn’t have possibly found it in himself to break the news. “I don’t want him to stick with me because he’s taking pity on me.”

Sofiane quirked a brow. “What about the part where you thought people would automatically leave you?”

“It’s the same thing. Either they leave or they stick around for the bad reasons.”

Like Lucille, he didn’t add, but he felt like he didn’t need to. Sofiane knew everything there was to know.

“So what’s the plan? Keep this hidden until an impossible situation forces the truth out?”, Sofiane insisted, a deep crease between his brow.

“The truth about what?” Lucas asked, strolling into the kitchen.

Eliott’s heart _might_ have skipped a bit. “Charles,” he said automatically.

Lucas quirked a brow, looking confused.

“Sofiane thinks Charles came back so fast because he thought Manon was dating someone else,” Eliott shrugged, then he turned to his friend. “Sof, I think they are waiting for the cake.”

“Oh. Yeah,” Sofiane mumbled, exiting the kitchen.

“Let me take this,” Lucas offered, picking a plate of cookies, already ready to go back to the living room.

Eliott suddenly felt something tighten in his chest, and he immediately put the plates he had been holding back on the kitchen elements. “Lucas,” he called out, and when his boyfriend turned back, he opened his arms and made grabby motions with his hands. “I want a hug.”

Lucas huffed a laugh and came back, putting the plate down and sinking into Eliott’s embrace. “What’s that about?” he asked, teasing, as Eliott nuzzled into his hair.

“I just wanted a hug,” he said.

His hands traveled up to cup his face, before he reached down for a kiss that had Lucas humming contentedly. They parted with a few more pecks, Lucas’ hands up Eliott’s shoulder-blades.

“I hope it’s fine,” Lucas said softly, meeting Eliott’s interrogative glance. “I know you don’t really like when there are too many people. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable.”

Eliott softened immediately. He had never expressly told Lucas about it — that it tended to exhaust him whenever he was the center of the attention for too long, that he struggled sometimes to entertain multiple conversations with multiple people in a short period of time, that he needed to take breaks from _people_ and that’s why he always went out to smoke, if only to have an excuse — and yet. He almost considered telling him right there and then. He had become better at this, better at accepting himself, better at accepting that there were things he couldn’t change, better at accepting the truth as it was. But Lucas looked happy, surrounded by his friends, celebrating a new life he was becoming week after week a part of.

“It’s fine,” he said, smiling, then he wrapped his arms around him once again. “It’s fine as long as there’s you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and it's a wrap! thank you for all the feedbacks, you guys are awesome 💕🤗  
> i know some things are left unresolved, but i didn't want to keep the story up for too long. I was thinking about maybe make a follow-up story, when i have more time, perhaps through Lucas' eyes this time, but only if you guys are still interested. Let me know what you think!

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading 🤗 don't forget to let me know what you think!


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